Nazi Party

File:Naziflag.png

The flag of Nazi Germany

Nazis is an acronym for the right wing National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei).

Most historians agree that the defeat of Germany in the First World War and anger over the Treaty of Versailles, specifically those provisions that restored territory to France, Belguim, Denmark, and Poland, disarmed Germany, and required that it pay reparations for the First World War helped lay the groundwork for the rise of Nazism. Adolf Hitler exploited the myth of the “Stab in the Back,” the belief that the war had been lost because “disloyal” elements within Germany – Jews and Marxists – had undermined the war effort. As William Shirer put it in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,

"To him, as to almost all Germans, it was ‘monstrous’ and undeserved. The German army had not been defeated in the field. It had been stabbed in the back by the traitors at home.

Thus emerged for Hitler, as or so many Germans, a fanatical belief in the legend of the ‘stab in the back’ which, more than anything else, was to undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler’s ultimate triumph.”

The origin of the Nazi Party itself was a small group called The German Workers' Party, founded by a locksmith named Anton Drexler who, in 1918, had set up a “Committee of Independent Workmen” in reaction to the Marxism of the free trade unions. A year later The German Workers Party was formed when this merged with another group, the Political Workers' Circle.

It was Adolf Hitler, who joined the party and was put in charge of propaganda in 1920, who transformed this small group into what we now know as the Nazi Party. That same year the words “National Socialist” were added to the party name and it became “The National Socialist German Workers Party” (NSDAP). The Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung, SA) in their distinctive brown uniforms, were organized first to kick out hecklers at Nazi meetings, then to break up the meetings of other parties. The hakenkreuz (literally: crooked cross), or the swastika, was adopted in the party’s flag. By the following summer, Hitler himself had taken over as leader (de: Führer) of the party.

The Nazis were anti-Semitic and blamed the Jews for the problems in Germany. They made laws against Jews ("Rassengesetze", race laws) which required Jews to wear a Star of David on their clothing. The Jews were mistreated, persecuted, and killed by the Nazis. The Nazi state also persecuted other political opponents, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, and foreign nationals. Though many top Nazis were openly gay , homosexuals who were not party members came under increasing scrutiny and persecution in the later years of the régime. The Nazis exterminated about 11 million civilians by rounding them up, transporting them to concentration camps and then murdering them there. About 6 million of these were Jews (see Holocaust).